movies, displaying not a trace of self-consciousness. Excerpts from her taped conversations with Warhol and with her mother run through "Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story," Shelly Dunn Fremont and Vincent Fremont's unsettling close-up portrait of Ms. Berlin, which opens today at the Film Forum. This fascinating but somewhat repellent documentary repeatedly contrasts interviews with Ms. Berlin filmed two years ago when she turned 60 with excerpts from the mostly black-and-white Warhol films in which she radiated the aggressive ferocity of a B-movie prison matron. Much slimmer today than in the Warhol years, Ms. Berlin, who lives on the East Side of Manhattan with two dogs, looks sleek and matronly at 60. But when she reminisces, it becomes clear that she retains a lust for the spotlight along with a continuing inability to edit what comes out of her mouth. As she chattily recounts a life of squandered privilege and wasted opportunity, the movie casts a bitter chill. After all her walks on the wild side, you wonder if she has learned anything at all. Not a smidgen of wisdom or enlightenment passes from the lips of a woman whose main goals in life today seem to be keeping a neat apartment and fighting an obsession with Key lime pies (one scene shows her berating herself for having given in to that weakness and gobbling three at one sitting). Ms. Berlin emerges as someone whose life and art were determined by her own obsessive-compulsive behavior, be it consuming sweets or collecting celebrity drawings of sexual organs in a notorious scrapbook. Besides her weight, the guiding motif of her life appears to have been he...
